A decade ago, much attention was given to how the Wichita public schools could better serve Wichita business. Then came the aviation layoffs, the No Child Left Behind law and more. The need for high-quality work-force training is driving Sedgwick County’s plan for the Jabara Airport technical training center. But with the aviation companies hiring, baby boomers retiring and technology constantly changing, public schools also need to be focused on serving employers’ evolving needs — one of the valuable messages to emerge from a Regional Economic Area Partnership summit last week. Not every kid will or should go to college, but they will need defined but flexible job skills. As Pete Gustaf, president of Wichita Area Technical College, told the gathering: “I am concerned our education system is not equipped to be reactive enough and progressive enough to meet the challenge we’re going to be facing.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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26 Comments
When I was in High school, there was two routes that could be taken. College prep or tech school, it was recognized exactly what is said in the piece. Sadly our education system has fallen short of late, more preparing student for the service industry. Occupations that at the end of the day has produced nothing that can be sold or exported. There is still college prep, but the other side of the coin is not making a strong work force for this nation. This reflect the reality of free trade and why the GDP is falling along side the GNP. When seven of the top ten industries that show a growth are in service i.e. Housekeeping, wait staff, telemarketing and the like we have less to export.
The problem with that is that there are many different types of employers. Not everybody wants to work on airplanes. Schools should prepare students for life and employment is only part of that. Many people do even figure out what they want to be when they grow up until they are grown up.
Kev I am still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I just did not think it would take fifty years to do it!
I thought it was a huge mistake that WATC was severed from USD 259. To this day I’m still not clear in why that was.
I’ve heard some stories on it, but nothing confirmed.
After that sever, WATC lost many valuable programs. Then they became top heavy and had more administrators than they did instructors.
I agree Joe; the evisceration of WATC has horrible. I attended several of the meetings and was appalled by the attitude toward WATC.
I could see seperation from 259 IF there were a place prepared to ‘put it’. That logically would have been a county-wide entity so people like me (in 265) pay our full share. My suggestion well over a decade ago was to transform it into a ‘tech/jr.college’ like Hutchenson is with full county support.
TRANSLATION:
WATC is begging for more money.
Send it to them!
(It’s free taxpayer money afterall)
Ben and others,
This is from memory. The legislature in 2004 or 2005 changed the statutes concerning vocational technical education in the state, placing the same under the Board of Regents. Thus, the separation from USD 259. This also happened with reference to the other two (as I recall) Vo-Techs in the state. The only thing I’m for sure about is that the vo-tech schools are the “red headed step-children” of the Regents’ system.
Anyone wanting to see how a vo-tech system should REALLY work only need go as far as Oklahoma. They have the best vo-tech system in the nation, and have for over 20 years.
kfg,
I agree. Did you know that Tulsa’s American Airline’s Maintenance and Engineering Base is the largest aircraft-service facility in the world? It’s so good that it has landed inspection/maintenance/repair contracts from regional airline companies.
This is a “service economy” business that pays excellent wages and benefits.
Vo-tech training should, arguably, have its own board, whose chair/president reports directly to the Secretary of Commerce. Forget putting it under the supervision the Secretary of Education. Evaluating commerce-supporting programs is beyond her pay grade.
“I agree. Did you know that Tulsa’s American Airline’s Maintenance and Engineering Base is the largest aircraft-service facility in the world?”
Yes. Tulsa was part of my territory when I was with AT&T. We also tried to recruit some of that work and those jobs out here when there was talk of moving some of that work.
I think they are settled back down now and not looking to move much, if anything.
Why? Not enough trained workers in Kansas. But please, wingnuts, continue to tell us that business development is all about taxes.
We need to allow academic-subject-uninterested students the opportunity to study and get hands-on training in practical disciplines starting at age 14.
Notice, I said “allow”, not “force”. This means advising students and parents, “You can continue in the conventional high school track, it’s your choice, but here are some vocational options that might be more fun for you. They include summer internships that pay $10 an hour, where students work 8 hours five days a week for 8 weeks, have 4 weeks of summer off, and earn $3200.”
MPS,
I agree with you on the offering of a “vocational track”. NCLB, however, as it currently exists is an impediment to this.
Perhaps the best we can do at the present is to prepare all students for their future education, be it technical, vocational, academic, or some other track, with any specialized training to occur in a post-secondary school environment. I’m of the thought that the best thing any education through high school can do is to prepare the students to be able to continue to learn as they make their way through the world post-graduation. The students should “learn how to learn”, with the emphasis in K-12 being placed upon equipping the students with the ability to critically think, while providing the fundamental knowledge necessary so they might so do.
The job of the public schools is to help our children become thinking adult citizens, not to turn out easily satisfied little worker bees for industry. Vo-Tech is a good thing, but in the end it is industry’s attempt to shift job training programs to taxpayer’s expense. If it is to continue, it should be funded by a special tax on the industries that profit from it.
In Hutch they matched it into the Comm College. That is what should have been done here – there is no excuse in our not having a CC and a good tech school.
But guess what your Senate is up to today…to compete with your prospective jobs the Senate just put the DREAM act up for vote again to give ILLEGAL ALIENS your school money etc. Her is what is in the DREAM Act.
The DREAM Act will grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens and help them pay college tuition at taxpayer expense. Please note that S.2205, unlike some versions of the bill, now has an age limit of 30. There is, however, NO CAP on the number of people who may receive amnesty under the DREAM Act.
Moreover, to make even MORE illegls eligible for amnesty under the program, Homeland Security may waive the following offenses:
* Failure to show up in court* Obtaining visas by fraud* Alien smuggling* Document fraud* Violation of student visas* Marriage fraud* Falsely claiming citizenship* Voter fraud
Once an illegal alien applies for legal status under the DREAM Act, he or she may not be removed—FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER—while the application is pending. Furthermore, the educational requirements in the bill are virtually meaningless as Homeland Security may waive the application of them if the alien can show “compelling circumstances for the inability to complete the requirements.” And, illegal aliens who obtain amnesty under this bill will likely become eligible for in-state tuition and for federal financial aid.
So you better study hard…or some illegal will pull the “affirmative action” card and take your new job anyway.
Roberts is going to vote against it…you better contact Brownback and read them the riot act to vote AGAINST the DREAM act.
Brownbacks office – 202-224-6521
In fact call all these asshats listed below and ask them not to support it.
Durbin (Asst. Maj. Leader) — 202-224-2152Reid (Maj. Leader)– 202-224-3542Shelby (AL)– 202-224-5744Hagel (co-sponsor) 202-224-4224Lugar (co-sponsor) 202-224-4814Brownback (KS) 202-224-6521Grassley (IA) 202-224-3744Lott (MS) 202-224-6253Cochran (MS) 202-224-5054Hutchison (TX) 202-224-5922Byrd (WV) 202-224-3954
Vaughn,
We have to offer alternative tracks to young teenagers, not trap them in conventional “academic” programs until they are adults for a number of reasons.
Jed, for example identifies the issue of producing worker bees for industry. At the post-secondary level, the only option is to provide single-industry training, unless we want to publicly fund 6+ year pathways, for young adults to change pathways, as occurs in universities, where students start with an idea to study this, then switch, then switch again. We don’t have 6-year vocational exploration and final selection programs. We have 2-year programs.
So we need to use the14-18 year old period to allow exploration.
Jed’s basic idea about public schools’ mission to create thinking adult citizens, not turning out worker bees, is right, but he overlooks the fact that public school teachers are worker bees. This is why public teachers adopted factory/mine industry unionization. It is why students sit at desks doing repetitive, boring work, with 30 children under 1 adult’s supervision. It is why we can visit classrooms in 2007, and recognize them to be like our classrooms in 1957, and if we are very, very old, recognize them to be like they were in 1927. And in 1927, they were designed to create worker bees.
So students are immersed in 13 years of worker-bee indoctrination in factory schools.
We have too many kids who are simply unhappy, forced to do things that are outside their talent repertoire, which leads to preventable depression, resentment and anger. The “good ones” take their meds, and tune out, without disruption. The really talented ones become subversive, and sabotage teachers and the education of other students.
They’re effectively screaming, if anybody wants to listen, “This program isn’t good for me. It’s just classifying me as a failure, because I have talents, but this place isn’t designed to identify and nurture them. So I’m pissed off. So I’m going to screw this system up as much as I can.”
We label kids as failures, when the reality is the system, designed by adults, is the failure point.
You can read fabulous English teachers Frank McCourt and John Taylor Gatto’s memoirs on teaching.
At “the other end of the spectrum”, you can watch Berkeley astrophysicist Richard Muller’s YouTube lectures that teach advanced conceptual physics to humanities and social science students which awaken them to “I didn’t know science was like this, I hated high school science, why didn’t they teach me THIS?”
The system creates failure. It gives awards to individual teachers who “think different”, but it doesn’t adopt the lessons they teach.
(BTW, every 12 to 16 year old science “nerd” in Kansas should watch Dr. Muller’s UC Berkeley video “Physics for Presidents” lectures. Every Kansas 12th-grade physics / AP and IB physics teacher should require students to watch these lectures–if they really want their students to learn physics.)
(Dr. Muller won a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and a Texas Instruments Founders Prize. All modern carbon-dating studies of archeologic specimens use an instrument he invented. He’s theorized that our solar system has TWO stars, the sun, and a red dwarf, whose periodic passage into the Oort Cloud, and gravitational redirecting of comets into the inner solar system, would account for the mass extinctions every 26 million years demonstrated in the fossil record. He’s been nominated for the Nobel Prize. A very smart guy, and a marvelous science teacher.)
MPS, maybe it wasn’t clear above that I agree with your premise about offering alternative tracks. So long as we are faced with the current reality of NCLB, as it is implemented, that’s not too likely to happen IMHO.
Yes, the classrooms I’ve visited seem/look a lot like the ones I experienced when I was in school. I see a few differences, but it seems that the basic model, implemented when the job of schools was to churn out assembly line workers, still is in place. I hope I’m wrong, that the idea of having some 25 to 30 students sitting in columns of desks, with the teacher being the “foreman” has nothing to do with what is actually happening there, and there are instructional models in place other than a “lecture/note taking” one; but, in the math, English, history, etc., classes, that’s what it looks like. I’ve seen a divergence from this in some science classes, where there are groups doing some “hands on” experiments as a means of reinforcing the assigned reading, etc., much better than my general experience to be sure.
I’ve not an answer here. How do we look at the general classroom, keep some semblance of order therein, and present “education” without reliance on this model? Yes, smaller classes seemingly would help; I feel that “ability grouping” students would help, too. I would think there is nothing quite as potentially dangerous to the general welfare of teachers and students than to have a subset of bright or very bright students in the set of students within the regular classroom who are bored to tears by what’s going on around them, for they would seem to have the intellectual resources to really cause havoc if they decided to do so. I’d think that on the other end, a similar group of below-average students would also be a danger, but a lesser danger. Would not everyone be better off by some sort of “segregation” based upon measured ability and potential?
I’ve heard the argument that having the top students in the general classroom is a good thing, that they serve as role models and as encouragement for the others to excel. I don’t buy this, based admittedly on my own personal experience. Since I believe one of the goals of education should be the maximization of each student’s potential, the top students in such a setting aren’t going to be those whose potential is maximized.
Yes, there is more to education than academics. I’ll not argue otherwise. However, what benefit is it to anyone to have students who are frustrated, whether due to boredom or due to not being able to “keep up” commingled with students whose needs are being met by the delivery of instruction designed for the middle (as I have heard many times the “normal” model is), both groups of whom are likely to be disruptive in different ways, which will, IMHO, impede the “average” student’s experience? No one “wins” in such a setting.
On another thread I argued against giving illegal aliens the same higher education tuition as Kansas citizens (including non-native citizens).
Why? Because really I like Mexicans. I love visiting Mexico, and being immersed in Mexican culture. Mexicans’ immigration doesn’t adversely affect me. But it does adversely affect millions of other American citizens. I have reservations about America being transformed into a Third World country, and in that condition millions of working-class Americans will be reduced to the impoverished peasantry of their progenitors.
Vaughn,
I strongly agree with you, except for making young people bide their time until age 18 to “branch out”.
We don’t have to accept an NCLB-aligned curriculum for all students age 14-18. This is an experiment intended to create accountability in a traditional academic-subject framework.
I think we need to give our young people more options. Handiwork, which can be mass-assembly, or custom cabinet-making, or photography, or graphic art, or fine art or musicianship, lets change it from “you have to sit through English, social studies, math and science classes, and then you can learn what you’re good at, at the periphery,” to full-time focus on what young people are good at.
What can we do to engage young people’s minds and spirits, and cause them to wake up each day and think, “I’m really looking forward to what I am going to do today. I gotta get moving.” Not because mom or dad makes them get up, but because they want to.
MPS,I’m certainly not ignoring the many worker bees in our school systems, I just didn’t address that problem in my previous post.
In my own educational experience I had the opportunity to be exposed to a few really great teachers to whom I owe a great debt. I also had a couple of real horrors. The rest were worker bees. I have always advocated the recruiting of great teachers into our system with offers of salaries commensurate with their academic achievement and experience, and competitive with the private sector jobs people of their abilities would qualify for.
I know brilliant teachers who were told by their departments to avoid taking jobs in Kansas systems. I’ve seen the figures that show that students in education departments have the lowest average SAT scores in our universities. I’ve talked to teachers from other systems whose starting salaries exceed what we pay here to teachers with 20yrs of classroom experience.Ir we are to depend on our schools to mold the minds of our greatest national treasure we shouldn’t expect to hire teachers cheap and tell them they have to teach what some churches pressure them to. We won’t get the education our children will need to prosper on the cheap. If that means some big industry doesn’t get it’s annual subsidy, too bad! This is our future as a nation we’re talking about!
“I have reservations about America being transformed into a Third World country, and in that condition millions of working-class Americans will be reduced to the impoverished peasantry of their progenitors.”But you don’t mind eating food harvested by illegal Mexican workers at slave wages or having your roof repaired by a company that hires undocumented workers below minimum wage? Providing education to children of undocumented immigrants doesn’t just improve their lives, but adds value to our entire economy. Our country has acheved what it has because it has taken the poorest people of the world and educated them and turned them into a national asset. Your ancestors included!
“
MPS,”Handiwork, which can be mass-assembly, or custom cabinet-making, or photography, or graphic art, or fine art or musicianship, lets change it from “you have to sit through English, social studies, math and science classes, and then you can learn what you’re good at, at the periphery,” to full-time focus on what young people are good at.”
I have spent my life as a fine artist with an extensive education in the arts. Art is not the business of producing something to hide that crack in the wall over the sofa. That is merely a marketable byproduct. Art is in essence an ongoing conversation involving all aspects of our culture, and requires a knowledge of all aspects of our society and it’s technology. That includes English, literature, social studies, math and science. An artist who only knows art has very little to say in such an exchange.
Most people do not listen to this conversation since they have their own lives to attend to, but it does affect every level of their lives. Every product you buy was designed by someone listening to that conversation. Every great novel you read was written by someone who listens in. Every commercial (with the exception of a few used car dealers) you see was designed by an artist/writer in on that conversation. Every great rock band has a connection to someone listening.Artists of course know about art, but they need a truly broad and continuing education to function as an artist. So do the highly successful people in any profession. People who only know one subject end up being worker bees.
Jed, the rationale expressed in your 3:34 PM post is one with which I am in total agreement. I think MPS, upon reflection, would also agree to some extent. I’m inferring here, of course, but what I’m reading into his posts is the availability of such tracks replacing the higher level math and science courses, for example.
However, before anyone says this, let me add that to the extent that computer graphics become/have become a part of the overall visual arts area, the study of some higher math is required. As most who have read here for a while know, I’m on the Site Council at NEMHS. The DigiPen courses (up to three, now) have become quite the draw to the school for those students interested in computer game design, teaching skills easily transferable to other areas. The basic math requirement to take the first course is a “B” or better in first semester Algebra II (PreCalc preferred).
While there is a need for “worker bees”, we don’t need as many of them as it seems we are producing. I’m a bit of a heretic here, as I’ve come to the conclusion that we, as a society, are best served by all students who matriculate at a four year college or university being required to obtain a liberal arts degree, with professional education reserved for the graduate level, in order to produce educated professionals, rather than highly trained technicians.
Vaughn,I agree wholeheartedly with you about the value of a liberal arts education. I’m somewhat less enthusiastic about the value of university training in fine arts. Too many very good artists don’t thrive in an academic atmosphere of constant committee meetings and the cometition for tenure, yet some of them are the best of teachers. While I endured a university fine arts department, I didn’t gain a true understanding of art until I worked in a modern version of what might be called apprenticeship with several highly respected artists. They opened my mind to aspects of my profession that the academic world seemed unaware of, and of the real world that academia wished would go away. Many fine arts departments actually discourage a professional approach to art, insisting instead on training the next generation of art academics.Universities are a good place to learn how to learn, and a good place to start, but most of what I use on a daily basis was learned after I left school. For an artist at least, practicing artists and the real world are the best teachers.
“I am concerned our education system is not equiped to be reactive enough and progressive enough to meet the challenge we are going to be facing,” reportedly said Peter Gustaf, president of Wichita Area Technical College at a recent meeting.
Several questions. Is Mr. Gustaf talking about education in general in the U.S., or in Kansas, or in the Wichita area?
What does he see as the “challenges” facing our education system in the near future? Is he talking about retirement of teachers and staff, a “challenge” facing almost every segment of business in the U.S.
Is he talking about the challenge of participating in the business world without affordable health insurance?
Who or what is Mr. Gustaf criticising?
And incidentally who in the Wichita Area Technical College world decided to put their new headquarters out on the northeast corner of the “Wichita Area” at the Jabara airport?
And is training airplane industry mechanics the highest and best use for our technical college? Even technical people working for the airline industry marvel at how local government selected that particular activity to spend local Sedgwick County tax dollars on, when private industry had managed to handle this function at their respective locations so well.
And what about the many other areas of education that a community college/technical college should be engaged in here in Sedgwick County?
Jed,
Your description of art makes good sense.
I didn’t mean to imply that students who chose alternative pathways should be denied access to academic knowledge, but rather, they should be able to primarily focus on what they deeply enjoy doing. For example, four hours of daily studio art and three hours of academic courses would be very satisfying to many art students, no?
Also, it’s great if a student can excel in academics, and okay if he or she can perform satisfactorily, but if the academic regimen is really depressing and discouraging for the student who can’t, that’s not what you want to subject this student to.
I do mind eating food harvested by illegal workers paid slave wages. I used to do fieldwork during summers. California migrant field workers, and occasional Anglos like me, used to make 2-3 times minimum wage, and in terms of purchasing power, minimum wage was effectively equivalent to about $9 /hr in today’s dollars.
Back then green cards were issued under a quota-ceiling system, card forgery didn’t occur, and the limits on guest workers gave them decent livings. Not while they were here, because they chose to minimize living expenses in order to save more than half their earnings, and then live well when they went back home every winter, buying homesteads, and typically by age 35-40, living permanently in Mexico. So we had a transnational flow of people that worked well.
I don’t know how much California fieldworkers make, but this year, reportedly, crackdowns on illegal employment created a worker shortage, which I strongly suspect forced farmers and agribusinesses to raise wages to compete for labor.
Labor is like any market: flood the market and prices go down, restrict it and prices go up.
There are many arguments for massive immigration, such as American families have shrunk to the point where we don’t have enough younger adults to meet the nation’s labor needs: our society is greyer than is healthy for the economy. Mexican and Central American immigrants are willing to do jobs that Americans reject. Their being here helps stabilize their home countries because the immigrants wire billions of dollars home. Immigration exposes Americans to the larger world, and strengthens our nation’s position as the world’s foremost international trader. It facilitates an evolution from a nation-state vision to a world-community vision. It is helping reverse the long-running decline in Catholic Church membership in America.
Unfortunately, mass immigration of low-paid, low-skilled workers impacts negatively on our own lower-income citizens. For example, there are American women who are willing to clean others’ houses. Actually, I myself did housework for a while as a white male university student. It paid better than minimum wage, it allowed me to work three afternoons with no evening shifts, and my home-owner employers let me occasionally switch a day, if I had a schedule conflict.
Today, in places with large immigrant settlements, the immigrants do homeowners’ housework. They do it for wages that Americans are unwilling to compete with.
It’s not that Americans reject the work, they reject the valuation of the work. For example, they don’t want to be forced to live with 3 other people in a one-bedroom apartment; they don’t want to live with 8 other people in a two-bedroom dilapidated bungalow.
This is how illegal immigrant laborers are able to underprice American laborers: they are willing to tolerate a Third World living standard.
The same issue applies to landscape maintenance, meat and poultry packing and construction. Americans will do these jobs. But they won’t do them at wages that force them to live in overcrowded squalor.
We had a nanny/housekeeper/cook many years ago. She was a widow. She had a small house (it may have been a manufactured home) on a 1-acre parcel. We paid her close to $3000 /mo in today’s dollars, which covered frequent evening work, picking up our kids from school using her own car, and occasional getaway weekends. Our accountant set things up so that it she wasn’t an “independent contractor”, she was a regular, lawful employee. We paid unemployment and disability insurance, SSI, etc.
Could we have hired an illegal immigrant and paid her $800 /mo cash under the table? Yes. But we chose to support an American grandmother, and enable her to enjoy a decent living standard. We made high incomes whose source was our community. So we put some of that money back into this community, rather than “outsource”.